The size of mobile devices, such as cellular telephones and personal digital assistants, has been greatly reduced since their introduction. Reducing the size, however, also reduces the ability to display information since the size of the display is also reduced.
Most World Wide Web capable devices have a larger screen than non-Web capable devices. This enables the device to display World Wide Web content downloaded from the Internet by the user. The displays and controls of the device typically include the ability to scroll vertically through the content that has been downloaded. Most devices, however, do not allow the user to scroll both vertically and horizontally in order to view large World Wide Web pages. This limits the World Wide Web pages that the user can download. The lack of horizontal scrolling also limits the audience that the owner of the Web page can reach with the information.
Since a mobile device's connection to the Internet is typically slower than a home modem connection, large Web pages require substantially more time to download to a mobile device. Additionally, most Web pages incorporate large amounts of unnecessary “white space” that does not contain any data and is there simply for esthetics for computer users displays. This “white space” is a burden to mobile devices. There is a resulting unforeseen need to reduce the size and unnecessary content of Web pages for use by mobile devices while keeping the larger size and content for use by computer users with larger screens.